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The question of a lifetime

Was his top-secret flight this war pilot's promised destiny?

by Jaimee Rose - May. 24, 2012 11:42 AMThe Republic | azcentral.com

Editor's note: A correction to the story was published on July 29, 2012.

Correction: During Philip Richey's research of his World War II service, he found a document he believed was the secret military order discussed in the story. The order was for a flight that happened after the atomic bomb was dropped, but the document could not be verified. The story reached the same conclusion: He was not part of the atomic bomb mission. But his discovery should have been included in the published article.

One of the last things my grandmother asked was that I never tell anyone this story.

***

They were newlyweds that summer, in the middle of World War II.

My grandfather was 22 and a first lieutenant - a flight instructor at George Field, Ill., who trained other men for war: Twelve hours on, 12 hours off.

One night in July, his orders came with a shock - the designation "top secret." He was told to take one of his students in a C-46 transport plane and fly all night to Seattle to pick up cargo and await further orders. Two other C-46s and pilots would accompany them.

The purpose was revealed to no one, not even him.

Before he left, he called my grandmother at their apartment. He'd be gone two days, maybe a few more.

Rest, he told her. Don't forget to eat. It helps with the nausea.

She was four weeks along. Their first.

"We flew all night," my grandfather remembers, a staggered row of three planes pushing through wet sky. It was quiet in the cockpit, and over the radio, too.

" 'Top secret' means that you don't talk about anything, you don't say anything, you don't ask any questions," my grandfather says. "You read what it says and you do it."

He gazed out the windows instead. Somewhere above North Dakota, "the weather was just so" that the plane's lights made prisms against the clouds. My grandfather looked over at the other planes and "could see a rainbow," he remembers, "a circle all the way around those airplanes - a complete circle, with all the rainbow colors."

He felt buoyant with importance.

The three transport planes landed in Seattle about 10 the next morning. Their cargo would be men: a couple dozen crew members on each C-46, whom the pilots were to courier to the Army base in Pyote, Texas, near the New Mexico line.

Before takeoff, the pilots from George Field were warned again: "We were not to ask these men where they were going, or what they were doing, or why they were going, or even have a conversation with them," my grandfather remembers.

They flew to Hill Field in Ogden, Utah, to spend the night. In the morning, they headed for Texas.

"We flew for a little more than an hour," my grandfather recalls, his student at the controls. Somewhere over the orange stripes and shadows of the Grand Canyon, the student reached up to flip the control-panel switch that engaged the plane's larger fuel tank. On takeoffs, they always used the smaller tank.

Nothing happened.

The tanks would not switch. The C-46, loaded with men on a top-secret mission, had "20 minutes of gas left, and we were flying over the Grand Canyon with no place to land," my grandfather says.

"I picked up the microphone and declared an emergency."

The men in the tower at the Las Vegas airport responded to his mayday.

"I'm running out of gas, and I can't do anything more," my grandfather told them. They gave him a heading to fly directly in.

He took control of the C-46 and held the controls tight over the canyon, relieved as the aircraft crossed the western rim and the earth closed beneath them. He kept his eyes on the horizon, scanning for places to land if the fuel gave out before they reached the airport 350 miles away. The plane sputtered down the Las Vegas airstrip and stopped.

Quickly, a mechanic fixed the fuel-tank switch and they took off again.

For the first time in his military career, my grandfather found himself above eastern Arizona, and close to home.

He took a small detour, steering over the San Francisco Peaks, dropping the plane lower as he crossed the Petrified Forest, and then, there it was: St. Johns - the pin dot on the Arizona prairie where he'd lived all his life, where his picture had run in the paper when he joined up.

And here he was, now a first lieutenant, flying a top-secret mission.

He couldn't help himself. He brought his plane down low and loud and buzzed the length of Main Street.

"First one way, and then I circled back and came down the other way," he says, grinning at the memory.

People later would tell him how the sound of the engines rattled the rooftops downtown, how his mother, Nellie, rushed out of the five-and-dime shop she owned on Main, how she ran out to the sidewalk to look up.

He circled back through, and she ran down the street, following his plane.

My grandfather delivered the crews to the Texas base the next day, having never asked them a question.

But as he headed back toward George Field, he overheard the other C-46 pilots talking. The men on their planes had been B-29 crews. Bombers.

On Aug. 6, 1945, Paul Tibbets and his crew boarded a B-29 Superfortress christened Enola Gay, after Tibbets' mother, and flew a mission over Japan.

On Aug. 6, 1945, they dropped the world's first atomic bomb.

It exploded 1,890 feet above the industrial city of Hiroshima, killing about 90,000 people and turning the place to ash.

The hulking mushroom cloud was even bigger than it looked -- it was a new American power that hung over the globe.

On Aug. 6, President Harry Truman told the country what had been done.

"It is an atomic bomb," he said. "It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe."

On Aug. 9, after Japan had refused to surrender, the U.S. dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki.

On Aug. 15, Japan surrendered, ending the war.

My grandfather can't remember the exact dates of his mission - sometime in mid- to late July.

And he can't remember when it clicked, but sometime in the months and years after my grandfather's flight, after the bombs and after the war had ended, there was a moment when he began to wonder: Had his top-secret mission been to transport the crew that helped end World War II?

He couldn't ask. Orders and "top secret" meant something to him.

He kept quiet for 50 years, until the day my uncles took him to an airplane graveyard and, in the presence of an aging C-46, his story came out.

It had felt, he said, "like a lonely secret."

He holds his story as close as scripture and tells it to family more often as the years pass and his birthdays tick like a clock that I can't stop: 87, 88, 89.

Every year, his question seems more important, like a defining thing in his life. Did he transport this crew, this crew that ended World War II?

"Tell my story, Jaimee," he said to me a few Christmases back, pulling me next to the tree when my grandmother wasn't listening. "I want you to tell my story."

I remember his blue eyes tight on mine, wet and desperate. They made me feel desperate, too.

I'm his granddaughter. I know his story.

But I'm also a reporter. To tell his story, I would have to try to answer his question.

My grandfather is a man of faith.

He is tall and thin and wears gray suits on Sundays, blue work jumpsuits on the other days, and can still fit into his olive-greenArmy Air Corps jacket, which is what the service was called when he joined in 1942. He still has stacks of letters from the War Department addressed to Philip Nielson Richey - that's his name. He lives in the same house he and my grandmother bought in 1946 when he left the Army and came home to St. Johns.

St. Johns is a pioneer town, settled in part by the Mormons who crossed the plains from New York to Utah and helped populate the West - my family among them.

In the Mormon faith, there's a tradition called a patriarchal blessing that usually takes place between ages 14 and 21.

The blessing, given only once, offers a kind of road map of personal blessings that will come with a righteous life, foretelling such things as marriage and children, education and profession. The words can be vague or specific.

The blessing is given in a private setting by a patriarch, who's usually an older man chosen by church authorities. Most often, the patriarch is a stranger to those who seek him.

Mormons believe that the patriarch's words form a piece of personal scripture and that during the blessing, the patriarch is speaking for God. The blessings are recorded and transcribed for reference throughout life.

My grandfather received his blessing Nov. 1, 1942. He was 19.

"I had just enlisted in the Air Force, and the world was turned upside down," he says. The nation had been at war for almost a year. Hitler's troops were marching through Russia, and a Japanese submarine was lurking off the Oregon coast.

He remembers going to the patriarch's house in St. Johns with his mother and sitting on a chair in a green kitchen.

The patriarch put his hands on my grandfather's head and began.

"Brother Philip: In the Rite of Patriarch, I lay my hands upon your head and pray for inspiration, that a blessing will be given you that will be a comfort, and in a measure, a guide in your future for your protection."

The blessing promised a wife and children, "many of them." It promised financial success. The patriarch talked of the war, and foretold that the United States "and her allies will come off victorious."

But the words that stood out to my grandfather were these:

"Your life has been wonderfully preserved under divine Providence ... for the Lord has a work for you to do. ... Therefore, your life will be spared, through sickness or health, through peace or war, till you have done the work that is before you.

"You will go through the present world war and return in peace and safety, while many will fall by your side on the battlefield. ... You will always be strong. ... You will be outstanding and valiant ever.

"I seal you up against sickness, accident and death till your work is done."

As my grandfather prepared to leave for basic training, the blessing hovered - a comfort and a weight.

In bed at night, he would turn the words over in his mind. His life would be preserved, spared, sealed.

He wondered why.

* * *

When my grandfather was just a kid, he almost died while riding a horse. He fell out of his saddle, got caught in the stirrup and was dragged across the family farm.

When my grandfather was a teenager, he had scarlet fever that turned into pneumonia. At his high-school graduation ceremony, the principal announced that he wasn't expected to survive the night.

When my grandfather was a young man, he was nearly killed in a accident outside Flagstaff. He hit a deer, was thrown from his rolling truck and spent hours bleeding on the snowy asphalt. The truck had landed on his hands.

When my grandfather was in the Army Air Corps, he was one of 239 men in Squadron 44C. When they completed training in the spring of 1944, 236 of those men were sent overseas. My grandfather and two others were kept back as flight instructors, and my grandfather felt cast aside.

He wrote to his mother: "Take my blue star down, out of the window." He didn't feel he was a real soldier. He was teaching kids to land planes in haystacks instead of fighting for his country.

When he became a flight instructor, his 236 classmates went to the Battle of the Bulge.

Ten of them came home.

My grandfather can't find his top-secret order. His flight log is 70 years old: a small black book I find in my grandparents' study with a gold monogram on the cover, mostly rubbed off. His records are terrible -- written in pencil, missing places and facts and dates. He remembers seeing that round rainbow, but not the exact dates of his journey.

Paging through his papers, I doubt I can ever answer his question.

But wouldn't it be so great to know?

In June 2010, while my grandmother is still living, I begin my search.

I call the Pentagon. They want to help but need details I don't have: order numbers, flight logs, dates. I give them his route, and his serial number -- which my grandmother recites for me from memory.

("The reason I know it," she tells me, "is because I wrote him every day.")

The Pentagon calls back.

"We can't confirm that this happened, but neither can we say that it didn't happen," spokeswoman Beth Gosselin tells me. "I'm sorry. I know you were hoping, for your grandfather."

The press rep at the Smithsonian Institution, where the Enola Gay and Tibbets' memorabilia are housed, asks whether I have confirmation that Tibbets was on board.

If only.

I dig around in books, old newspaper stories, on the Internet. I send e-mails, request information, expect nothing. Then one afternoon a few weeks later, my cellphone rings loudly against my desk.

"Jaimee? This is Andrea Tibbets. Paul Tibbets was my husband. We were married 54 years. I think you sent me an e-mail."

My hands shake as I rummage for a notebook. I feel threads of history swirling and intersecting, my heart pounding, the world seeming small and wide at the same time. It is 2010. It is 1945. The wife of the man who dropped the atomic bomb has called this tiny phone in my hand.

"Yes," I say, grasping my pen.

"I am not very good with e-mail, so I've called," she says. "Unfortunately, Paul has passed away."

I knew Paul Tibbets had died, but I wanted to know if he'd told war stories during his life the way my grandfather has. And I wanted to know about the summer of 1945, and whether Tibbets' story and my grandfather's story match: if there had been a trip to Seattle, to Utah, a near-crash into the Grand Canyon.

"Very rarely did (Paul) talk about that period," Andrea Tibbets says. I can hear France in her voice. She grew up there, she explains, and lived there during the war. Before she met Paul Tibbets, he flew the first daylight raid on French soil.

He bombed her country, too.

"It was better," she says, "not to talk about the war."

Some things, she tells me, are better not to know.

* * *

In July, I call my grandfather at home in St. Johns. The answering machine picks up, and I know to wait, to leave a slow message, give my grandparents time to get to the phone. My grandmother answers, hands him the phone.

"Well, hello, dear," he says.

I picture him in the study that smells like old paper, on the phone by the cabinet where my grandmother keeps my favorite childhood toys: notebooks and pens.

I ask him all the Pentagon's questions, but I've asked them all before. Again, we go over his route: George Field. Seattle. Utah. Las Vegas. Texas.

Finally, I reveal what I'm doing. I tell him about the Pentagon, the Smithsonian, about my call from Andrea Tibbets.

"Grandpa," I say, "I'm trying to tell your story."

On the other end of the phone, I can hear his quiet tears.

I ask about his old uniform, whether it's still in the guest room. I ask him about life on the Army base. He tells me that they used to listen to "Stardust" at night. On the phone, he begins to hum the melody and we sing the words together. I'd learned the lyrics from his daughter - my mom.

On the phone, he tells me about when the war ended, when America was full of parades. But he stayed in the Army until 1946 and missed all the celebrations. After, he came home to St. Johns to help his father start a construction business. There were jobs for pilots overseas, but he had a wife and a baby.

They had named their first son Steven, after my grandfather's best friend from Squadron 44C.

He told me that my grandmother cried, coming back to the flatness of St. Johns after all the excitement of the base. My grandfather remembers how he cried, too, but never let her see.

Preserved. Spared. Sealed. He felt like there should have been more.

"Maybe now," he tells me on the phone. "Maybe this."

There is one more person I can call.

Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk was the Enola Gay's navigator. He is 91 and the only crew member still living.

He lives in Atlanta, and in early August, his wife, Eileen, answers the phone. The TV is loud in the background. She hands the phone to her husband, and I launch into my grandfather's story.

"Yes, ma'am, but what do you want from me?" Van Kirk asks.

I ask if he remembers his route - the cities he and the Enola Gay crew stopped in on their way from the U.S. to Japan.

Yes, he says, his voice impatient.

My hands begin to shake.

They were training in Wendover, Utah, he says. Then they flew to a field north of San Francisco. He can't remember the name. Then to Hawaii. Then to Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, and on to Tinian, the Pacific island just off Japan that became the Enola Gay's home base.

No Seattle. No Grand Canyon. No Texas.

Fear courses through my body. His words feel 25 feet tall.

I ask him if he's sure.

Yes.

He sounds sure.

I ask whether Paul Tibbets was with him, thinking perhaps the crew was split apart.

"I was with Paul every step," Van Kirk says, and the other Enola Gay crew members took the same route.

He continues: "Ma'am, all I can say is that your grandfather sounds like 1,000 other people I've talked to over the last 40 or 50 years. I wish I could make a million dollars selling all the stories I have."

He invites me to come see him at an upcoming convention in Las Vegas. He'll be signing autographs.

Stunned, I mumble a goodbye and hang up.

I ache for every soldier that ever told this man a story, hoping to be understood.

And too late, I realize that I never really thought I would find my grandfather's answer - that summer was too long ago, and his memories too vague.

Too late, I realize that I have disproved a story he clung to as proof that his life mattered, that he might have been important.

And now I have to tell him he was wrong.

Too late, I understand what Andrea Tibbets was saying.

It was always better not to know.

* * *

It's Labor Day weekend 2010. My mother and I drive northeast to St. Johns. My grandfather has been leaving me messages, but I haven't found the guts to return them, to call him, to tell him what I know. It's my lonely secret now.

The afternoon sun is low as our car bobs up and down the hills that lead into town. The highway on the high prairie is lined with September sunflowers, and there are wheels of hay in the fields - hints of autumn, and I don't want its melancholy.

Things are changing. My grandparents are preparing to move for the winter, out of the house they've lived in since 1946, because they need help and care.

My grandmother is too tired to go to church, to climb stairs. My grandfather has an appointment to check for another blockage in his heart.

We've come to help them pack.

Their home is on the same street my grandfather buzzed in his Army C-46 so long ago. There are pink hollyhocks along their driveway. There is the familiar chime of the doorbell, a round of hugs, pot roast on the stove.

They've been waiting.

My mother and I help set the small wooden table in the kitchen beneath the German cuckoo clock that marks the passing time twice an hour, insistent and cruel.

We take our places at the table, mine next to my grandfather. He offers a blessing on the food.

Heavenly Father, we are grateful. Please keep us safe from harm.

I pray silently - my first prayer in years.

Please help me find the words.

We are just passing the bread when he asks what I've found.

"Are you talking to the War Department?" he asks. "Maybe if they look into secret orders ..."

I don't want to tell him that there were thousands of secret orders during every month of World War II. This was the only one he ever received.

I stare at my plate. The tomatoes from my grandfather's garden are as red as my grandmother's Coke can.

My water glass is sweating on a green-striped place mat.

His hand is on the table. I cover it with mine.

And then I tell him.

I tell him about Dutch Van Kirk, and how Van Kirk's route didn't match his. I tell him that I called the Pentagon again, and they confirmed it. I tell him that they looked deeper into Paul Tibbets' papers and found that he flew the transport planes himself.

I say it all as fast as I can.

"But it's OK," I tell him. "You're still a hero. You've always been a hero to me."

When I can finally raise my eyes to his, I see something in them that tears me in two.

My grandfather looks timid: afraid of me, and of the words coming out of my mouth.

His bottom lip is trembling.

And then I tell him what I believed all along: his life mattered outside of that day, that airplane, that war. I tell him that I love him, and that the Enola Gay didn't matter.

But then I look again in his eyes, and see that I was wrong, and that it did.

Religion is the guiding force of my grandfather's life, and it asks a person to take things on faith.

Journalism is the guiding force of mine, and I've learned that the traps lie in the things you don't know.

Faith asks that you not question. Journalism insists that you do.

And I didn't understand that having this question to ponder was what my grandfather had loved.

I received my patriarchal blessing when I was 20.

The patriarch was a university professor whom I'd never met. We shook hands. Mine were sweating. During the blessing, he spoke about my future work.

I hadn't told him I wanted to be a journalist.

"Your voice will be raised up, made powerful, influential," he said.

But the words that stood out to me, then and now, were these: "You are to be mindful of the messages you deliver."

* * *

The next morning, my grandmother finds me alone and asks me to keep my grandfather's story to myself, for his sake.

My grandfather and I make breakfast together. We roast chiles from his garden and stir them into eggs, without talking.

When we sit down, he finally speaks, asks me if I'm sure.

Maybe he was transporting a backup crew, he says. Maybe the men on his plane were doing something else important.

"Maybe," he says, "you could look into that."

No, I tell him, I wish I could, but the Pentagon has been clear. They can't answer his question.

"I've thought about it all my life, dear," he says to me. "I wanted to believe it."

Seeking solace from my mushroom cloud, I climb the stairs to my grandparents' attic, where there's a playroom full of old toys and all my grandparents' mementos.

It is a place of memory.

I am still thinking about my grandfather's question. Preserved, spared, sealed - if not for the crew of the Enola Gay, then why?

I start looking through all the things around me: piles of photo albums, a box of keepsake baby clothes and Halloween costumes galore.

My grandparents have seven children.

I move aside the old high chair, the baby buggy, the train sets.

My grandparents have 34 grandchildren.

I open a box marked "church news." Inside, I find the telegram my grandfather sent, asking my grandmother to meet him in Phoenix for their wedding, and a matchbook from the Adams Hotel, where they honeymooned. I pull out my grandmother's old velvet hats, and the photos of her pregnant and wearing my grandfather's leather flying jacket, and the snapshots from a road trip that ended with my grandparents skinny-dipping in a lake.

Buried at the very bottom, I find a stack of yellowing letters that they wrote to each other the year they got married. He sent this two weeks before their wedding. The envelope crackles when I pull it open.

Oct. 3, 1944

Dearest Anna,

To me there couldn't be anything more wonderful than having you for my wife, to love, to live, to make a present and a future and to grow old together.

The other day Arch said to me, "You know Phil when this war is over there is going to be a great field in aviation, more so in other countries such as South America than here in the U.S., and if you are married you won't be able to get in on something like that."

He is very right but to me the only thing I want to do is something that the two of us can do together, to make a home somewhere we will always like to be. It won't matter to me where if you are with me. Darling, without you there would be no reason for my really wanting to get something out of life ...

Goodnight sweetheart I am thinking of you always.

All my love

Phil

Months later, my grandmother is sick, and my mother hints that it's time to say goodbye.

I drive to St. Johns and find her awake in bed, tucked beneath her lavender bedspread, my grandfather sitting on the edge of the mattress.

He leans on his cane to stand, and lets me have his place.

I press my hand to her forehead.

"Hello, dear," she says, smiling. "My hair looks awful."

I am grateful for the laugh.

She tells me that my grandfather has been combing her hair for her, that he's "doing such a good job."

He comes back into the room, to take her blood pressure.

He tries to get her to drink something, and holds a cup to her mouth, angling the straw with his fingers.

Family and doctors swirl in and out.

The day has been long, and I want to distract him.

"Grandpa," I say, "I finished writing your story - the one about the Enola Gay."

"You did? Well, now," he says, "is it a war story?"

"No," I tell him, "it's a love story."

His eyes catch mine.

We stay that way for just a minute, his bottom lip trembling. Then he nods at me, turns, and walks back to her side.

Reach the reporter at jaimee.rose@arizonarepublic.com.

About this story

Jaimee Rose is a features reporter at The Arizona Republic. Her grandfather, Philip Richey, 89, is retired and lives in St. Johns and Mesa. He gave Rose permission to share this story. Anna Richey died in October. He was with her.